thanks for this. I'm afraid I haven't had the time to do any real research to back up my current reflections. You would have thought that access to stats would have been an ideal use for the web, but unfortunately I have yet to find a decent world economic statistics site yet. All the commercial economics publications charge (hardly surprising for a bunch of capitalists I suppose). If you have any leads on on-line sources I love to hear of them. I'm particularly interested to source data on productivity in terms of average personhours per unit (as opposed to meaningless monetary figures). This is to check out a conversation I had with my US source (my father :-) who mentioned that industrial strategists in the US had only recently done widespread research on physical productivity levels and were quite shocked to find that, stripping away the obscuring effect of money, physical productivity levels in the US were much closer to East European that German or EU levels. This ties into my ideas on the effects of imperialism (briefly: a release of pressure on the search for relative surplus value, leading to a decline in physical productivity vis-à-vis lesser imperial countries - as happened with the UK during the second half of the 19th C). Obviously I'd love to get hold of some figures to check this out. Any ideas would be brilliant.
I'd also be interested in seeing % reserve in DMarks for the same period as below. I suspect it would be interesting...
gotta go
Paul